3 Quebec films land on Cannes Directors' Fortnight program

Three Quebecois films and one Canadian co-production have made it onto the lineup for the prestigious Directors' Fortnight festival, held in parallel with the Cannes Film Festival.

The best known may be Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique, which dramatizes the December 1989 massacre of 14 female engineering students at Montreal's cole Polytechnique.

The other Quebecois films are Carcasses, by Denis Ct, which focuses on a lonely man who collects old cars, and J'ai tu ma mre (I Killed My Mother ), a first-time film by 19-year-old Xavier Dolan.

Also hitting the lineup of 23 featuresisthe Canada/U.S./Kuwait co-production Amreeka, by Cherien Dabis. The filmfollows a Palestinian mother and her son from the West Bank who move to Illinois.

Launching Director's Fortnight is Francis Ford Coppola's black-and-white film, Tetro, a story of sibling rivalry set in Buenos Aires.

The picture, starring Vincent Gallo as an exiled writer whose estranged younger brother comes to visit him in Argentina, was entirely self-financed by the Godfather filmmaker.

The 70-year-old director had first been invited to screen his latest film out of competition at Cannes this year.

But the Oscar-winning filmmaker refused the invitation, saying that to screen it at a gala event would not have been "true to the personal and independent nature of this film."

The closing film is Ajami, a story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which features multiple viewpoints as characters clash. It is co-directed by Israeli Yaron Shani and Palestinian Scandar Copti.

The Director's Fortnight considered a sidebar event to the flashy Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14-24.